Conquering the Swamp: Swapnado Lives!

Way back in 2019 I was watching the Rifftrax of Sharknado (or Sharknado 2) and thought:  Swapnado!  Wouldn't that be a brilliant Eric Filler story?  Instead of a tornado full of sharks it'd be a tornado that swaps people.  I checked and made sure no one else had already had this brilliant idea.  Then I set to work...

Except as I said in a previous entry it didn't go so well.  I had killed people off and made it all grim and gritty, which Sharknado movies aren't.  There seemed no way to salvage it except to do a complete reboot.  Which I didn't feel like doing...

Until about April 2020 when I took another stab at it. This time I didn't kill anyone to keep it lighter.  But the problem was it just kept stretching longer and longer and it seemed like it wouldn't end and with Covid raging, I really didn't want to tie myself to any long-term projects.  So I shelved it...

Then in early 2021 I finally seized upon a different setup for the story.  The first two tries I was using ordinary people who get caught on the road.  Which always seemed a little too forced.  I mean, how do you only have two or three people on a road and getting caught in this storm?  Then it hit me:  storm chasers!  People who go to storms, often in tricked-out vehicles.

It took a couple of months to clear out some other stuff I was doing to finally try it a third time.  And...it got off to a rocky start.  First I was going to use first-person but that seemed kind of limiting because I was going to have 2 main characters.  And then, while I had probably a couple of months to look shit up, I hadn't and really had no idea how storm chasers work.  So I had to look some stuff up on Wikipedia and Google to figure this stuff out.  And I tried using a location with a dam and stuff because I thought whoever was making the chemical to get sucked into the tornado would have a secret lab there, sort of like the first Transformers live action movie.  But that didn't really work out so well either...

Basically this third try needed three tries to get going.  I changed it to 3rd person and alternated scenes between the POVs of the two chasers:  Cameron and Sean.  And I didn't really try to use any cute locations.  I simplified that part of it so there's a tanker on the road that has the chemical and it gets opened by the storm and boom--Swapnado!

Having finally conquered all that it would be easy from there, right?  Noooope.  Like the second attempt, the story kept kind of dragging on and on.  I was tempted to quit a few times and do something else, but I really wanted to get through it this time, so I stuck with it.  But still, it often felt like slogging through a swamp, making slow, steady advances towards the end.

The thing is, I knew what I wanted to do in the end:  there's a second storm that threatens to turn into a Swapnado that could affect a whole bunch of people.  Our heroes use a new storm chasing vehicle to throw a bomb into the tornado to destabilize it.  Which is bullshit science-wise but that's what they do in the first two Sharknado movies so I wanted to honor that.  It was just getting to that point that was hard.

You might think:  well if you had such a hard time writing it then it must suck, right?  I don't think so.  It's just that there's all this character-driven stuff as Cam and Sean (now Shawn) adjust to their new lives as girls.  Plus I had to set up getting a new storm chasing vehicle and all that stuff.  It's a lot of stuff you have to do to get to the end point that's not as much fun but needs doing.

Finally, as the calendar turned from spring to summer, I broke through the swamp to the end I had in mind.  I only needed a couple of days to get that end done.  At last, it was finished!  It came in at just a hair under 80,000 words, so it's actually a decent-sized novel. 

There are 6 Sharknado movies but I don't think I'll be working on a sequel anytime soon.  The first one was exhausting enough.  But the moral of the story is that sometimes you just have to push through to get out of that swampy middle part and to the other side.

On a side note, I'm not thrilled with the cover.  It's a one-piece image I bought from some site but I don't really like the girl in it.  I mean, what's going on with her hands?  It looks really unnatural.  I probably should have found someone else to paste in there instead.  But the title font does pretty much look like the Sharknado font, though I couldn't find an exact duplicate.  You be the judge:

The End?